


whatever we lose(like a you or a me)

by thisparticularlight



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-03
Updated: 2016-04-03
Packaged: 2018-05-30 21:08:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6440857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisparticularlight/pseuds/thisparticularlight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Hawkeye - the bright vivid heartbeat of the MASH 4077th - has been transformed by the Korean War into the center of something after a lifetime of living around the edges."</p>
<p>a life told in love and losses, and in the ways those losses come back to us. basically a character study.</p>
            </blockquote>





	whatever we lose(like a you or a me)

**Author's Note:**

> title and chapter headings are from "maggie and milly and molly and may" by e.e. cummings.

**a shell that sang / so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles**  
**(morning, and an introduction)**

Hawkeye - the bright vivid heartbeat of the MASH 4077th - has been transformed by the Korean War into the center of something after a lifetime of living around the edges. The war has turned him into something so crackling with the angry visceral headiness of being alive that he wonders if any of them would believe that he is actually somebody for whom the end of the war will mean slipping back into shadows, into falling asleep in a lamplit living room, his father covering him with blankets at eleven-thirty and the pine trees outside scraping the glass and the frost in the windows as November brings a chill.

The first time Henry describes him to a visiting general as  _ the heart of this whole thing _ he shudders, having spent so long trying to avoid being crucial. Trapper spares him an  _ oh yeah? _ type of glance and waggles his eyebrows, likely already composing the litany of teasing that will greet him when they get back to the Swamp, but Hawkeye only wants to ask Henry to take it back, for reasons eclipsing modesty and dancing toward evasion. He imagines a heart beating, pushing warm healthy blood into all the cold, abandoned parts of a body coming back to life, and he shakes his head:  _ please, not me. Not this. I have never wanted anything like this _ .

And then Henry leaves, and Trapper leaves, and Hawkeye, all over again, must learn all the ways that abstract words like  _ loss _ and  _ death _ and  _ grief _ can suddenly knit themselves into the stark fabric that makes up everyday details: extra room on the bench in the mess hall, or an empty table that Frank catches him eyeing in surgery. The silence that hangs heavy and oppressive in the Swamp when Frank is out with Margaret, and Hawkeye rolls up the window to look at the stars. The stars themselves; Trapper had once spent an entire night tracing constellations for him, explaining in a rare moment of tenderness that Northern states could easily make out Cassiopeia.  _ When we go home_, Trapper had explained, slowly, as if there were entire universes between his words.  _ Well. When we go home, you’ll spot it. No problem. _

And then Frank leaves, too, and it is as if one morning Hawkeye has woken up and everything is different, other than the one thing he’d have changed: they are all, still, in hell.

“Hawkeye’s kind of the heartbeat of this place,” Kellye explains to a newly-arrived Colonel Potter, a slight man that Hawkeye somehow still doesn’t want to see the wrong side of, and a pang escapes him, thinking of Henry’s words months earlier; Hawkeye hadn’t realized that such an echo could be applied to half a team.  _ PierceIntyre_, Henry had so often raged, and Hawkeye and Trapper had dissolved into helpless laughter.  _ That _ was the heartbeat, right? That powerlessness to do anything in the face of this place but collapse into each other and giggle… the things that connected them.

Potter looks to him now, sizing him up with an edge of hopefulness that Hawkeye hadn’t realized could line the wrinkles of a regular army man’s face, and Kellye looks between them so proud and so shining that Hawkeye can almost feel himself shrug.

_ Well, fine, then, goddammit_, he thinks, and commits to pushing warm blood into cold places, with or without Trapper, and viciously hitting back against so many bodies, so many bullets, so many bombs. When he and Kellye leave Potter’s office together, he takes more care than usual to look around, memorizing the planes of each new face even as he reaches into himself and finds so much love for the old faces, the ones he’ll see in his sleep for the rest of his life.  _ For you… anything_.

It sneaks up on him a little, this centering, but then: Korea has changed everything else, too. Why not take his unfamiliarity with hell and turn it into an acknowledgment that he is the glue holding it together?

Months pass. The glue holds. In the beginning, right after the explosions of leaving, he thinks about it all the time, almost with every breath: someday, he will tell his father so much about these days.  _ At the ready with a joke, Dad. You’d have been proud of me_. These are the days during which Hawkeye pins everything to that word, thrumming like a pulse under his pillow:  _ someday. Someday. Someday.  _ At some point, though, he loses the threads: the last letter written, the last absent thought before sleeping. At some point, it becomes easier not to think of Maine at all. (He wonders sometimes whether the only glue holding  _ him _ together isn’t his seeming inability to do what is easy.)

_ I am lonely without this,  _ he realizes one morning looking around the camp, just before heading into surgery. Is it possible that this has shifted into something anywhere near a home?

_ Home doesn’t have to just be a place_, Henry had said to him, once, drunk as a skunk and holding a picture of Louise, eyes glassy.  _ Home can be anything. Or anyone. _

BJ’s palm slips between his shoulder blades, the same light that this good, good, endlessly good man has been radiating since the first morning:  _ I’m here. We’re here_. 

And all at once, Hawkeye understands.

“Hawk,” BJ whispers, guiding. “Come on.” 

Hawkeye shakes his head. “Yeah,” he murmurs, pressing the heel of his hand roughly to his eyes and letting himself be steered. “Okay. Yeah.”

  
  


**as small as a world, and as large as alone**  
**(adelaide, and a beginning)**

Colonel Potter calls him  _ Ben _ at first, and he snaps at him without thinking. He imagines that somewhere, Henry Blake is looking down at him and muttering with equal parts fondness and exasperation:  _ Christ, Pierce, give the guy a break_.

Sometimes he thinks maybe he loves BJ so much because he got to discover him. BJ was new land: an undiscovered continent, and he’d met him on a rare excursion outside the confines of hell and for a blessed few moments, it was almost as if they were two perfectly real people meeting for the first time. There was never a reason to correct him, because there was never anything to correct in the first place: he got to explain himself to BJ, who didn’t learn that  _ Ben _ crept behind  _ Hawkeye _ until days after they’d gotten to camp - a forgotten afterthought, nothing defining.

BJ had gotten him right from day one.

Weeks after snapping at Potter, Hawkeye had confessed his sins to BJ, reclining onto his cot during one of their first drunken late evenings together. “I just tore into him,” he tells BJ, half expecting him to recoil. BJ, for the first time in what will become a long series of unflinching  absolutions following Hawkeye’s transgressions, just nods.

“I understand,” BJ had told him. “Sometimes I wish I’d brought in a nickname. Something to keep my real self out of it.”

Hawkeye’s breath catches in his throat at how it feels to have BJ get it wrong for the first time.  _ It isn’t like that_, Hawkeye hadn’t known how to tell him, and so he’d turned away. “‘M tired,” he’d murmured, punishing BJ because he hadn’t known how to do anything else.

“Yeah,” BJ had assented, in the soft, unsure tone of someone who has broken something in the dark. “Long day.” 

Even in the face of Hawkeye’s coldness, BJ’s words are gentle and forgiving and they twist and turn into something ugly at the base of Hawkeye’s spine.  _ We’re all lost_, Hawkeye knows, and BJ is the newest of all and can’t be expected to get everything right all the time, and certainly can’t possibly be punished for the first misstep he’s made, weeks in - except that Hawkeye is the oldest of all, and he is hard and frayed and raw, all at once, somehow, and though he looks at BJ and sees someone that he knows he will love, he can’t change himself. 

This is the night that Hawkeye begins keeping secrets from BJ: a departure from his relationship with Trapper, where a thought sparked was a thought spoken. This is the night that Hawkeye realizes that there are things in him borne of a darkness that BJ doesn’t know yet, and that to care for BJ is to let him stumble across these dark things in his own time. This is the night that Hawkeye constructs a list.  _ This would be so much easier if we’d met when we were new together, or old together_, Hawkeye begins, just before falling asleep. He thinks about BJ, about how terribly young he still looks, and he wants to tell him:  _ the hope on your face is so bright that I want to stand in your light and warm myself up with you_. He thinks about everything else - this night’s darkness; Korea; his own fucked-up heart, a pre-existing condition if ever there was one - and he knows what he would add:  _ It’s not your fault. None of it. _

+

His mother had called him Ben. “Love you more than the sun and stars, Ben,” she would whisper each night, brushing the hair out of his eyes to kiss his forehead, hair that he still keeps long because he’ll be damned if he’ll ever grow into somebody his mother wouldn’t recognize.

“Love you, too, Mama,” he’d whisper back to her. He hasn’t done right by most of the people in his life, but his mother is the exception.  _ I lost you before I figured out how to be unkind. _

Adelaide Pierce had loved books endlessly. She’d had all sorts, and they were constantly draped over windowsills, stacked all over the front porch in the summertime, stuffed into kitchen cupboards and bathroom cabinets. “I don’t like to be too far from one. You should try it sometime,” she’d tease Daniel, who would laugh, and who one summer finally took her up on it. 

The summer he was seven, they’d all read The Last Of The Mohicans together, and his father, for the first time that he could remember, had fallen in love with a book - the kind of love that usually was reserved for his mother, but which that summer threatened to swallow up their whole house.

“You see?” Adelaide had insisted. “What would you like to read next?”

“Oh no,” Daniel had shot back. “I’ve already read the perfect book. Why follow it up? Isn’t that right, Hawkeye?”

His bright second-grader eyes had lit up even more than normal at the unexpected use of the nickname, and he couldn’t resist clapping his hands together.

“Oh no,” Adelaide Pierce had grimaced. “Daniel Pierce, don’t you do that.”

“Do what?” his father had asked sweetly, batting his eyes so his lashes fell long over his swooping nose.

“Yeah, do what?” the newly-christened Hawkeye had joined in, the same dark lashes framing the same long nose, and for neither the first nor the last time, Adelaide found herself powerless against her boys.

“Well, all right then,” she’d grumbled, and Hawkeye and his father had exchanged small, knowing smiles. “Hardly a hill to die on, I suppose.”

But she’d kept trying occasionally; always casually, as if she’d thought of it just moments ago for the first time. “You could be so very many other things,” she would cajole, stirring biscuits, Hawkeye watching intently until the craggy dough came together, each time effortlessly, as if his mother had not just narrowly averted a crisis built of things falling apart. “What about Sherlock?”

“Hmm. That’s good, but I don’t think so.”

“You could be… well, you could be Aslan?”

Having just finished the first installment of the Chronicles of Narnia after reading for over a year, he considered it seriously before shaking his head. “No, that doesn’t fit. Too...” He groped for the word, seven-year-old brain feeling at once too big and too small. “Too grandiose.”

“Indeed,” his mother had huffed incredulously. “Well… you could be Mowgli, how about that?”

“How a _bout _ that?” he’d scowled, one of the only times he could remember anything verging on meanness toward his mother (for which he would thoroughly and exhaustively apologize before that night’s supper had hit the table, he gratefully remembered each time). “What a silly name.”

“You’re right,” Adelaide had responded, rolling her eyes. “Wouldn’t want you to go through life with anything _silly _ , would we, Hawkeye?”

In the end, any protesting on Adelaide’s part came too late to prevent or alter a late-stage renaming - an inevitability almost before Daniel had breathed it. Hawkeye took to his nickname like a fish to water, and Adelaide eventually accepted it, occasionally even allowing herself to ruffle her son’s hair affectionately and murmur, “Hawk”, before kissing his forehead. 

By the end of elementary school, he was Hawkeye to teachers, to neighbors, to the children that would someday make up his graduating class. He was Hawkeye, proudly, during the unit that his sixth-grade English class read the Last of the Mohicans. He was Hawkeye the cloudy autumn day that he cleared a seventy-yard touchdown behind the school and Kevin Olson slammed his bicep a little harder than he might have hoped and hollered:  _ good one, Hawk_. A nickname for the nickname, he’d thought to himself. It’s got to stick now.

But most of the time, still, to his mother, he was Ben. He was Ben when he was sick, when her cool hands spread over his forehead and fed him soup, crackers, and water on a clockwork schedule; Ben when she was proud of him, like the time he’d come home from the last day of fifth grade having won the geography bee; Ben when she was angry at him, and he thought she’d chew clear through the bottom of her lip.

When he was ten, she died, and for reasons he’ll never understand, he wasn’t Ben when she was dying. “I love you so, so much, my Hawkeye,” she’d murmured, kissing him as tears streamed down his cheeks. “My sweetheart, my Hawkeye, I have had such a good life, and you have been all the best parts of the whole thing.”

He and Daniel had driven home that night without speaking, for the first time in the history of the Pierce family. Daniel looked unstuck, unanchored, and adrift, in a way that terrified Hawkeye, and Hawkeye had thought, turning everything over and over and over in his mind.

_ I love you, Mama_, he’d thought, just before falling asleep that night. And just like that, it was as if he’d taken the name  _ Ben_, held it up to the light one last time, and then folded it up, the way a person might fold a t-shirt just before tucking it into the back of a chest once winter begins sneaking into the floorboards. He’d put it away, needing something warmer, and for the rest of his life he’d been Hawkeye to strangers and to the people that loved him most in the world.

The next morning, Daniel had woken early and knocked on the doorframe to Hawkeye’s room.

“Hawkeye,” he’d said, eyes rimmed bright red but voice strong and clear. “I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am. You know she’d have stayed if she… if she could.”

“I know, Dad.”

“This is going to hurt for a long time,” he’d continued, gruff, looking away in every direction to avoid looking at Hawkeye. “But I’ll be here. I’m not going anywhere, son, you hear me?”

Years later, Hawkeye will think back to that and wonder how in the world his father was able to get away with being so foolhardy. Any of us, he will realize, can go anywhere, at any time, whether or not we want to. Whether or not we love people to whom we would choose to cling. He will hold onto that fragment for the rest of his life, smoothing it with his fingertips and occasionally clutching it in his fist like a locket or a dog tag and letting it dig into the palm of his hand so angrily that it leaves a mark -  _ people to whom we would choose to cling _ \- the night Carlye leaves. The morning that Trapper is gone. The day Radar reads Henry’s letter. There are a precious few things that Hawkeye will always know how to find his way back to, and this sear across the heel of his hand is one of them.

Hawkeye at ten, though, is grateful for his father’s rashness without quite understanding the mechanics of being so. He sits up in bed, runs a hand through his messy hair, and he looks up at Daniel Pierce and he says: “I miss her.”

“Like air,” his father replies immediately, crossing the room to sit on Hawkeye’s bed and encircle his son in his arms, Hawkeye’s lanky frame shaking into him as they both cry the way that men do when something dear is lost.

The next year is spent re-remembering, over and over, the permanence with which his mother is gone. In the weeks after the funeral, he half-expects to see her in doorways, and around corners:  _ here I am. I was so lost. Thank you for finding me_. He walks through so many doorways, and around so many corners. She is never there. 

Almost a year down the road, there are still doorways and corners that catch his breath in his chest. There are so many days that he comes home with some dark unnamed part of his heart convinced that he can, even yet, do something to win her back: that he could be sad enough, or brave enough, or good enough. Some days, he comes home after crying in the school bathroom between third and fourth period and heads straight for his bed, drawing the curtains so that he can go to bed early and believing, with everything in his still-too-small body, that this ocean of grief must be enough to bring her back or to kill him, because it cannot be another way; he cannot climb out and live the way that Ralph Peterson does, with simple joy in his eyes because his mother has cut his tuna fish sandwich into triangles.

Eventually, he begins to understand; later, he begins to believe. Later still, it becomes part of his truth, a vital, crucial detail of the tapestry making him up:  _ I am seventeen. I want to be a doctor. My mother is dead_. The moments when something happens and he expects to see her grow further and further apart. He will, someday, attempt to explain to Sidney the paradoxical way that this allows his life to burn both brighter and dimmer; there is both freedom and duress in letting her go. 

_ (It let me grow up, finally, but in the only way I could still do anything: without her.) _

The last time is the first Friday afternoon in March of his senior year in college. Hawkeye has driven the three and a half hours to his hometown, practically by rote, head spinning the entire time. By some cosmic coincidence, Daniel is home early from the clinic, sitting in the overstuffed armchair that’s been in the Pierce living room since before Hawkeye was even an idea, and so Hawkeye is able, after jangling the key in the exact way it’s always taken to enter this house - down and to the left - to stumble into his father’s vision and murmur weakly: “I got in. Harvard. Med school.”

His father’s eyes, filled at first with disbelief that Hawkeye is even standing in their house, begin to swim with joy, with pride, with relief, and he thinks it may be the happiest he’s ever seen his father. This cracking and splintering of his father’s heart to make room for the realization of everything his son will become is not enough: this is the best thing he has ever done, maybe will ever do, and Adelaide is not there, and this is what it takes. For the rest of his life, he knows that she is gone, and he navigates corners and doorways with an effortlessness that would suggest that he has never believed in ghosts. 

When he graduates second in his class, the dean asks for a brief biography, as is customarily included in the commencement program for the top five graduates each year.  _ Benjamin Franklin Pierce hails from Crabapple Cove, Maine, _ he writes, forming the loops and dips of each letter painstakingly.  _ He is the son of Daniel and Adelaide Pierce_. The dean says his name, and then his father’s, and then, finally, his mother’s. He walks across the stage and it feels as if a thousand flash bulbs are going off in his eyes - like he’s blinded, and will be forever. It’s all right. He doesn’t need to see. He knows without looking: she isn’t there.

  
  


**whatever we lose(like a you or a me)**  
**(carlye, and trapper, and a history, and another beginning, however improbable)**

  Hawkeye is ten and though he will become an expert at splintering, it’s the first time he shatters, and the last time he can’t move through it. His mother is here one day, and not the next, and the bright red blood that it snatches out of his heart is real and vivid and it leaves him gasping.

Hawkeye is twenty-eight and Carlye is leaving - scratch that, Carlye is gone, just like with his mother there is no  _ leaving_, no gradation. There is a  _ before _ \- Carlye’s sweaters and books all over the apartment that he’s lucky enough to call  _ theirs _ , Whitman opened to a page Carlye was reading aloud to him the night before while he did the dishes, spine sagging this morning underneath the weight of a thoracic manual - and then, immediately, an  _ after_. January morning light streams through the living room’s windows and dances across its hardwood floors, and Hawkeye’s breath catches in his chest at the sight of it.  _ So bright_, Carlye had murmured, the first morning they’d woken up together, sleeping on that same living room floor on the twin mattress Hawkeye had brought with him when he’d moved south for Boston.  _ This could be such a lovely little home_.

( _Let’s go buy a bed_ , Hawkeye had replied on that first morning, even as something warm and joyful blooms in his belly and he knows that what he meant to tell her was  _ I love you, I love you, I love our bright lovely little home and I love you_, and he kisses her temple as they dress and head for the only furniture store in Boston they know how to find, and maybe they were doomed from the very beginning. Has he ever known what to do with bright lovely things?) 

( _You are so beautiful_ , Carlye had told him on the last night, at the very end of everything. She’d spoken to him literally half out the door, with her hand on the antique brass doorknob they’d fallen in love with while viewing the apartment together for the first time. He has no idea where she’ll go when she closes the door behind her to leave.  _ So beautiful, and so brilliant. You’re so many things, Hawkeye. I wish you’d let yourself be mine._) 

_ Maybe I don’t know how to belong to anybody, _ he thinks the next morning, throwing a tennis ball against the radiator, because if the sharp visceral gasping that comes along with being ripped apart from Carlye Breslin isn’t  _ belonging to_, then maybe he  _ has _ just been playing games this whole time. He wonders, hot salt-water stinging his eyes as he bites his lip: Is it possible a person could love another person more than this? Are there really people on this earth who know how to give someone more than I gave her? 

_ If there are_, a stray thought races across his mind, _ I hope that she finds one of them. _

At the same time that he’s begging for distraction from the salt in his eyes and the metal on his tongue, the phone is demanding attention from somewhere deep in the kitchen, in the same insistent tone that doctors hear in their sleep forever. He lifts it off the hook with a gingerness he doesn’t quite understand - what is he expecting to hear, after all? - and hears the only person he’d have taken a bet on being on the other end of the line: the surgery dispatcher, announcing a kidney failure.  _ This_, he thinks, looking over the James River.  _ This, I can fix. _ And so he climbs onto a subway car, and crosses the city, and thinks about the things that twenty-four hours can bring. 

Last week, an old man on his floor had died after months of rattling coughs and fitful spasms. He’d worked to file the paperwork with the man’s daughter, a friendly woman with whom he’d grown close over the last half a year of seeing her near daily.

_ Have you ever lost someone after a long fight? _ she’d asked him, tiredness seeping into all the cracks and corners of her voice.

_ No_, he’d told her.  _ I’m so, so sorry for your loss_.

As the sun rises over the James River, he remembers yesterday morning, on the way into work, carrying a brown paper lunchbag labeled with “Hawkeye” in Carlye’s tight, precise script and a small perfect heart immediately below. He thinks to himself, on the way into the hospital door:  _ Whether it looks like yesterday or today, I will only ever be yours. _

+

Hawkeye is thirty-two and it’s a Tuesday and a boy is looking up at him and begging the doctor not to tell his mother about the VD shot he’s about to receive. “I love her, Doc,” the boy insists, and Hawkeye frowns; this is not a new line to him. “Nobody’s worth this at sixteen,” he tells the boy sternly, before writing him a prescription that will clear it up in two weeks. “Wrap it up next time, do you hear me?”

Hawkeye is thirty-two and it’s the next Monday and a boy is looking up at him and begging the doctor to tell his mother how deeply he loves her. “I didn’t say goodbye,” this boy tells him, thick around the foam and the blood in his mouth. “Can you understand that?”

“Almost,” Hawkeye tells this boy, thick around the tears in his eyes and the fog in his head. Welcome to Korea.

( _I was so small_ , he tells Trapper, once, holding onto a Korean baby who is blissfully unaware of being five minutes into orphanhood. He presses his nose and mouth into the top of the baby’s head and breathes deep.  _ I was about as small as you can be and still be hurt by ideas. I loved her so much, Trap. I was so small, and I loved her so much._)

Hawkeye is thirty-three and Trapper is gone and Hawkeye doesn’t have any idea what day it is, and he’s wondering what it is about him. The word  _ goodbye _ feels rusty and broken in his throat, well-worn in his mind but weighty and underused in his mouth.  _ Goodbye_, he mouths, letting the long ‘o’ and the drawn-out ‘y’ linger behind his teeth, wondering when anyone will let him say it out loud.  _ Goodbye_, he sometimes practices in the Swamp, when Frank is out doing god-knows-what, and he stares at the way the steam from his breath hangs in the air above him and he knows that there are only a very finite number of particles on this earth and he wonders whether Trapper will ever breathe a piece of the air he’s breathed a farewell into, and then he wonders whether it would matter, because God knows Carlye breathed in a thousand farewells from him. 

( _I want you to be all right_ , he thinks, and he thinks it at his mother, remembering the way he’d asked his father if she was going to be okay, or if she would get cold in the dark. He remembers burying her with his blanket, the one she’d knitted to keep him warm through Maine winters. He remembers tucking her in carefully, trying three times to get it exactly right and not stopping until he knew his efforts would keep her warm. He remembers deciding to be a doctor.  _ I want you to be safe_, he thinks, and he thinks it at Carlye, who got herself a goddamn apartment and still needed his goddamn help to move - and who then got herself a  _ new _ goddamn apartment and  _ didn’t _ need his goddamn help to move, and who could be anywhere in the wide world, and he thinks that if she has to go home to an apartment that isn’t theirs at night then so fucking be it, if it means there’s a place she can call home in the first place.  _ I want you to be warm and happy and okay_, he thinks, and he thinks it at Trapper and he wonders whether Trapper would ever say it back to him. He remembers realizing that his father was a doctor, and that his mother still died; that he was a doctor, and that Carlye still left.)

+

At the beginning, Hawkeye thinks that as new bunkmates go he could do worse overall, especially because as far as he can tell BJ doesn’t seem to notice much. Really, BJ notices just about everything, but a lot can hide under the guise of a man who watches without speaking. Besides, nobody’s perfect, and BJ, an excellent collector, sometimes falls down when it comes time to put the pieces together. 

When BJ was a child, his grandfather taught him to pan for gold: the activity itself largely a novelty, an artifact of growing up in the Bay Area, but a chance for the two to spend time together.  _ You want to look for whatever stands out from its surroundings_, his grandfather had explained.  _ Look for what seems out of place_.

“We used to date,” Hawkeye exhales, all in a rush, a bundle of nerves that BJ has no idea what to do with. “Casual thing. We uh - we lived together. For a - well, for a year. Or two. I don’t know.”

_ Gold! _ his grandfather would shout.  _ Follow that vein, BJ! _

“I don’t - I don’t mind her being here. No, I don’t think I mind at all,” Hawkeye is muttering, clearly looking as if he wants to stitch his fingers together. BJ thinks he might do it for him if he doesn’t stop fidgeting. In the spirit of following the vein, BJ raises his eyebrows.

“Maybe we can go show them the welcome wagon.”

Hawkeye looks horrified. “Not here,” he hisses, and BJ rolls his eyes.

“There, then.” He bites his tongue to cut off the  _ Jesus _ that almost escapes. Getting this exasperated at Hawkeye’s sudden and debilitating case of the nerves would be delightful if it weren’t so spooky.

“There,” Hawkeye agrees, and off they go.

Over about six minutes, BJ exchanges about three sentences with Carlye; he is such a minor sideshow in the terrible table tennis game the two of them are playing. In BJ’s mind, the entire time that Carlye is finishing Hawkeye’s jokes and looking over BJ and the other nurse’s heads to share a knowing look with Hawkeye, she is slowly but surely morphing into an overarching villain: the key to the way that no matter how BJ looks at Hawkeye, the pieces don’t fit in quite right.

BJ expects that, as he gets to know Carlye Walton over the next two weeks, everything will finally slot into place, and he will finally be able to make sense of this man who at once burns hot and runs cold; who grasps at even the faintest straws of intimacy but who hides away from tenderness and sincerity. He anticipates that to know Carlye Walton will be to finally understand Hawkeye Pierce. 

Instead, it’s as if everything falls apart, and he needs to return to the drawing board, because she is nothing -  _ nothing _ \- like the abominable snowman that BJ had dreamed up, imagining that Hawkeye is so hurt that it  _ must  _ have gone something like this.

What he learns, quickly, is that it  _ doesn’t _ go like that. It goes like this: Carlye is warm, and she is kind, and she is at least as hurt as Hawkeye, with whom she is deep, deeply in love, the kind that doesn’t die with absence. It’s the first time he understands: Hawkeye and Carlye loved each other at least as much as he loves Peg, and it wasn’t nearly enough. BJ realizes, after a few days of chewing this over, that he is terrified of having learned that this much love could come up short, having planted everything he’s ever had on the way he and Peg love each other.

Hawkeye asks him, once, if he’s ever been unfaithful. The answer - always, his whole life - has been _no _ , but if Peggy hadn’t been thirty seconds away from connecting to him on a long-distance Trans-Pacific telephone call, BJ thinks he likely could have been a lot less graceless with the way he presents a pat answer to what is probably, for Hawkeye, a very pressing concern. As it is, BJ dismisses him almost like a businessman shooing away a child:  _ run along, now. I have a very important phone call to make, with someone I love very much_. _ You’ll understand when you’re older. _

“You’ve got a lot to learn about messing up your life,” Hawkeye tells him, and they share a laugh even as BJ tucks that into the list of things to soothe, later.

In some ways, it isn’t fair, BJ thinks. If he could have spared Hawkeye from having to have the stitches ripped back out and left open in front of him, he would have, but Korea is about neither fairness nor gentleness, and so Hawkeye is instead eviscerated and BJ, helpless even to avert his eyes, instead simply takes careful notes -  _ if I cannot give you privacy or mercy_, he thinks,  _ I will at least be meticulous when we clean your wounds. _ And so for weeks, he waits: waits for everything to be over, waits for Carlye to leave, waits for the casual, easy grace to come back to the relationship he shares with Hawkeye when they aren’t weighed down with questions of fidelity, of permanence, of deserving. It’s a lonely time; but the strangest and saddest thing is that it seems to be at least as lonely for Hawkeye, whose happiness is ostensibly who this has all been for in the first place.

_ Is  _ this _ what you think it’s like, then, _ BJ wonders absently, the third night in a row of Hawkeye sneaking back into the Swamp, looking furtively in every direction before carefully closing the door behind him. He remembers the night Peg agreed to go out with him, so proud that he walked her halfway around San Francisco.

_ You’re waiting, too, aren’t you? _ BJ realizes, all at once, and the utter weight of the aching sadness that goes along with being Hawkeye Pierce sags onto his chest and steals the breath right out of him.  _ Right alongside me, you’ve just been waiting all this time for her to leave again, too? Haven’t you? _

The night that Carlye leaves is not the same night that they talk about it. The night that Carlye leaves is the same night that Hawkeye looks out the tent window, with a wistfulness and a longing that does something funny and awful to BJ’s insides, and he murmurs that although she is gone, she never altogether leaves. The same night that BJ digs inside of himself to think of something kind and real to say, and that Hawkeye cuts him off by asking for a drink, and then another, and then another.

“I’m sorry,” BJ tells him, the fourth night that Carlye is gone and the first night that it feels okay to talk about it. For four days BJ has been carrying around with him the realization of all the ways that Hawkeye inoculates himself against losing, against grieving. For four days BJ has been grappling with what it means to be falling in love with the strength it takes to show up anyway, making jokes and saving lives and taking care. Fidelity, BJ thinks now, is a funny thing.

“For what?”

“Well, I’m sorry you’re hurt.”

“I’m okay. It’s nothing new, anyway.”

BJ isn’t a man for swearing or for fighting, but he wants to take Hawkeye by the shoulders and shake him until his teeth clack together and scream  _ well maybe that is exactly fucking it _ because Hawkeye is a man with a million faults but none of them add up to growing an idea over three decades that this is love: this business of sneaking around - of stealing kisses, of lingering in dark corners and tracing whispers into the cobwebs where no one else can see. And if there is anyone -  _ if there is any-fucking-body on this goddamn earth,  _ BJ is screaming in the make-believe part of him that climbs onto rooftops and yells - that doesn’t deserve to have inherited this painful calculus, it’s Hawkeye.

“I think I just want to go to sleep,” Hawkeye says, no trace of a joke anywhere in his voice. He sounds tired, he sounds old, and he sounds small, and all of a sudden, every piece of this room BJ has been slowly building over the last week crashes down, with the words  _ real _ and  _ too much _ graffitied onto the roofbeams. “It’s been a long day, you know?”

_ One of my favorite things about you_, Peg had told him during their pre-marital counseling, as part of the exercises assigned to them by their pastor,  _ is that when you tell me you love me, I believe you. You aren’t showy or over-the-top. You’re just honest. _

“You aren’t too much or not enough,” BJ says, as plainly as possible. “You weren’t right for Carlye, but it doesn’t mean that you’re wrong.”

Hawkeye is quiet for a long time. BJ never knows what it means when the lights stop, and so he decides instead to wait it out. “Thank you,” Hawkeye finally says, in a voice that BJ’s never heard before, without any sharp edges or glances around his shoulder to see who’s watching. The stillness in the room is palpable, but BJ wouldn’t have needed it to understand how deeply he is cutting.

“It isn’t your fault,” BJ continues, and when Hawkeye snaps his head back up to stare at him, BJ mistakes incredulity for sharpness. “It isn’t,” he insists, and Hawkeye smiles.

“I’m grateful for you in ways you might never understand.” There’s a grin on Hawkeye’s face as if BJ has just told the funniest joke in the universe, and for as much as BJ wants to know what the hell is going on, there’s a much larger part of him that wants to sink into this happiness and revel in the idea of this place going “back to normal”.

That night, BJ kisses him for the first time. It is soft and gentle and it feels like being forgiven for being wrong and cherished for being right all at once. 

“It isn’t your fault,” BJ says again, and Hawkeye lets out a tiny moan and clutches the other man closer. “None of it.”

 

**it’s always ourselves we find in the sea**   
**(BJ, Peg, and the end)**

Hawkeye is thirty-four and he feels a thousand and he looks right at BJ and he says: “I have so many goodbyes that I carry around with me every day that sometimes I think I might collapse under them.”

“Your mother,” BJ says softly, and Hawkeye, to his everlasting horror, starts to cry, not ever having dared to even learn  _ how _ to hope that he would find someone here, in this khaki-dirt hell, that would figure out how to start at the beginning.

“My mother,” he acknowledges. “After all this. My damn mother.”

“I never met her.” BJ laughs a little. “Obviously.”

“Obviously.”

“But I’ll bet she would have given anything not to leave.”

“It doesn’t matter. A person doesn’t even have to want to stay, Beej. It doesn’t matter. People leave anyway.”

“I suppose you’re right.” BJ sighs, picking up all six foot three inches of himself and carrying his long lanky body across the Swamp to land right next to Hawkeye, too close for anything but flint and sparks with the way his legs settle against Hawkeye’s. “But it doesn’t mean their wanting to stay with you doesn’t matter.”

BJ’s words -  _ with you _ \- so unnecessary and so needed - hang in the air between them, and Hawkeye closes his eyes, trying to figure out how to tell BJ how wondrously rare it has been for him, over the course of his life, to find people with whom he can allow himself to feel the full weight of exhaustion. Leaning his head against BJ’s shoulder, he reasons, is likely as good a start as any other he will find anytime soon.

For a few moments, BJ listens to Hawkeye breathe, shallow and slow. He slopes his shoulder down, creating a space just large enough for Hawkeye’s head to press into his skin, and he thanks God for the warmth in his body at the same time that he tries desperately to transfer it into Hawkeye’s.

“I’d like to tell you something,” BJ murmurs after a pause, staring at his hands, folded in his lap, “and I’d like you to know that I’m telling you because I’d like you to have it.”

“You’re pregnant,” Hawkeye slurs, and BJ’s shoulders shake with surprised laughter - best kinds of both things, he knows Hawkeye would say, and his heart thrills with the warmth of Hawkeye.

“No.”

“ _I’m _ pregnant.”

“Shut up,” BJ replies good-naturedly, and Hawkeye falls into obedience.

“Whatcha got, Beej?”

“We’re in a war, you know.”

“Oh, god, are you serious? That’s even worse.”

“Shut  _ up_,” BJ repeats, laughter taking all of the bite out of his words. “We’re in a war, and you know better than anyone that things change in an instant here.”

“Right.”

“So what I want to tell you is…” His voice trails off, and BJ is looking over his hands more studiously than ever. “Oh, hell, Hawkeye, what I want to tell you is that if something… if something… happened, you know? If something  _ happened_, because sometimes things  _ do _ happen… well. If something happened, and I didn’t tell you goodbye, it wouldn’t be because I didn’t want to. It would be because something so terrible happened so quickly that I didn’t get a chance to find the best part of it all and say thank you.”

“Maybe not so terrible. You could go home, you know. Not everyone leaves here dead. Or so I’m told.”

BJ raises his head, jostling Hawkeye’s head off his shoulder, and turns to look Hawkeye in the eye. “I’d miss a plane home if it meant finding you and telling you-”

“Shut up,” Hawkeye mutters, crushing his face into BJ’s with none of the levity that BJ had used earlier to undo the same words. “Don’t do that. You shut right the hell up, right the hell now.”

“I want to tell you how careful I am with myself,” BJ continues, running a hand through Hawkeye’s hair. 

Everything about BJ Hunnicutt is too much. He’s a train running off the rails and Hawkeye is so fucking in love with how wild and overgrown he is. What a fate it is, Hawkeye thinks, to drown with the vivid sturdiness of one’s own lifeline. “I want to tell you what an honor it is to be someone precious to you, and I want to tell you that I take that seriously - Jesus Christ, Hawk, I take it so seriously - and I want to tell you that in a weird screwy way I owe you everything, because if it weren’t for you and how you need me, this place would have gotten to me ages ago, but because of you and how you need me, I keep myself safe. And I want you to  _ know _ that I do that, because I want you to know how important your happiness is to me.”

“Shut up.” Too much. Drowning.

“If I could give you anything, I’d give you not ever having to doubt anything about me.”

“Shut up.”

“I want to tell you thank you, and I want to tell you that every good thing I have left I have because of you.”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up. Please, God, please,” Hawkeye sobs. “Please, shut up.”

“No. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

“Please.”

“ _You’re _ okay.”

“I’m alone.”

“You never will be,” BJ replies, nipping at Hawkeye’s lip by mistake hard enough to draw blood. The minerals seep into his mouth: steadiness, earthiness; a feeling of being anchored. “Oh, God, Hawk, I’m sorry…”

“It’s okay-”

“But you never will be.” BJ runs his tongue over the blood on Hawkeye’s lower lip, looking to soothe. “Alone, that is. It’d be impossible, because I’ve already known you.”

They kiss the way that BJ imagines dying people kiss: hungry, desperate. BJ spent ten months - more or less since the second he met Hawkeye - keeping a list of all the reasons he shouldn’t kiss Hawkeye. Immediately after this list was nullified, he composed in its place a list of all the reasons he should  _ stop _ kissing Hawkeye, shouldn’t let it happen again. All the while, he realizes later still, he’d been tucking a third, smaller list behind the first two; as all good doctors do, BJ had tended toward hope, but at the same time had created a contingency plan made up of all the things Hawkeye deserves out of what is by now an inevitability, an inexorable pull toward just such a kiss. (If it has to happen, BJ reasons, it will happen the way a doctor would kiss someone: calmly, slowly, peacefully. It will happen in a way that heals, that helps, that stitches up:  _ “Close.” _ It will not happen in a way that tears, that rips, that crushes.) 

Here, now, in spite of months of lists and reasons and plans, they kiss all the ways that BJ has been trying so hard to avoid: frantically, as if they don’t have any time left, as if someone could catch them, as if they’re a fire trying desperately to swallow everything up because at any moment someone could put them out.

_ No one could_, BJ thinks, when Hawkeye shoves his hips against BJ’s thigh almost defiant with how he refuses to be ashamed.  _ We came into this country ignited. _

“You should have come first,” Hawkeye murmurs miserably. “You should have come before they did. Before anyone else.”

“I came when I could, which was last,” BJ says, gently. No use pretending that things wouldn’t have been easier another way. “Do you know, though, that if I’d known about you… if I’d found out about you earlier, I would have been near you the second I knew.”

“Oh, God.”

“And I don’t even mean here. Korea notwithstanding, if I’d known about you there would have been no hope for me.”

Immediately after he says this, BJ realizes that it’s true. He allows himself to remember the wholeness that he’s felt with Peggy Hayden Hunnicutt since the night he met her, and then, timidly, to imagine this wholeness threatened by the knowledge that somewhere, three thousand miles away overlooking an entirely different ocean, Hawkeye Pierce exists. 

_ You fit into a part of me that this place created. How am I supposed to go back? _

“Imagine if we’d met at a conference,” Hawkeye says, helplessly giving himself over to this same fantasy he’s been building for months now: the things that bring them together don’t exist, and they find each other anyway. “Imagine no war. Imagine we both stay at the Hyatt in New York City and we both go to the same lecture on cardiopulmonary embolism and it’s horrible because the lecturer doesn’t know his hand from his ass and imagine we make eye contact with each other from across this huge room, and we both ask the same question and it stumps him and we slog through the rest of the lecture, and then imagine I buy you a drink after, to congratulate us both on surviving.”

“In any reality, we survive, and we celebrate it,” BJ replies, dipping his hand into Hawkeye’s waistband. “And in any reality, it takes me about forty-five minutes to fall in love with you.”

“I can work on that conversion rate,” Hawkeye breathes, something dark and light and funny and sad twitching in his chest like a living thing at BJ’s words. “You met me at a very weird time in a very weird place. Not exactly pitching an A-game.”

“It’s the A-est game I’ve ever needed. You met me at the worst time in my life and you immediately gave me something to hang onto.” BJ laughs a little into Hawkeye’s mouth, in spite of God, everything, and himself:  _ and so where on Earth else would we have ended up, after everything, other than here? _

Hawkeye is squirming against him, is pushing into him in a way that he isn’t even sure is sexual anymore. What does it mean when a person seems to want to occupy the very space that your body takes up? What does it mean that Hawkeye feels this for him?

He wants to tell Hawkeye:  _ slow down_. He wants to tell Hawkeye:  _ we have so much time_. He wants to tell Hawkeye:  _ everything is going to be okay_. 

“Hey,” he says instead, because the only guarantees Korea will give them are painted in khaki and ambulances, and plants his hands on Hawkeye’s hips. “Hey. Get over here.”

“Getting,” Hawkeye replies immediately, muffled by how hard he’s trying to kiss. “Got.”

+

Hawkeye is thirty-four and the soft hairs around BJ’s temples are tickling the hollows in his hipbones as the other man traces down the lean, narrow lines of his body. “Hello,” he breathes.

BJ looks up at him and smiles. “Hi, yourself.”

A breath, held in his chest and waiting for thirty-four years to exhale:  _ You are so many beginnings_. Hawkeye shivers, and BJ laughs.

“God, you’re a beautiful thing,” BJ sighs, hovering over an obscene dip between Hawkeye’s hip and navel as he pauses to flip open the button of Hawkeye’s pants. What a fucking thing to say. What a beginning. “Just the most beautiful thing.”

Hawkeye is thirty-four and here, in the middle of this scorched-earth, it is May and it is warm and somehow on the Korean hillsides, bluebells are opening, baby birds are learning to sing, and BJ is breathing reverence into Hawkeye’s skin with no end in sight.  _ Yes, and? _ Hawkeye wants to prompt, wanting from bitter experience to skip right to the end, and instead BJ nips at the crest of Hawkeye’s hipbone and breathes in and out, slowly, as if he has all the time in the world, as if there isn’t anything the world could give him that would allow him to sigh more contentedly than this. Hawkeye is thirty-four and BJ kisses his body as if they’re just getting started.

_ You are an absolutely wild thing_, Hawkeye thinks, wondering whether he is the only person in the world to see BJ like this: undone, unfettered, unashamed. BJ allows himself a quiet, brilliant smile, and Hawkeye allows himself, however recklessly, to think that anything could grow from these roots.

“Please, Beej,” he grates, and BJ, who has always somehow known exactly when to tease and when to indulge, nods a little and lowers his head. “Oh, Beej, yes, yes,  _ yes_.”

“Mmm,” BJ returns.

“Love how responsive you are.” Hawkeye hopes, deep in his bones, that BJ understands: by the end of the war, Hawkeye will have described every single thing he loves about BJ, and all of those things will add up to the sum total tapestry of BJ Hunnicutt’s life, and he hopes that BJ will understand that this is just what you do when the words  _ I love you _ feel too far away: you trace the outline, instead.  _ I never learned_, he would tell him, if BJ ever asked, because if he can’t give him  _ I love you_, he can give him why not.

(In his own way, BJ does the same thing for him, he reasons; it’s just that BJ has learned, somewhere along the way, to proclaim love like a reflex. His heart beats with it, the same way Hawkeye’s own heart beats with fear and reticence, both of which he’s given BJ in spades, and this business of draining their respective hearts dry to give their gifts to the other seems to be the shape that  _ taking care _ has assumed for the two of them. And it isn’t as if BJ is stupid, after all; Hawkeye loves BJ enough in his own way to trust that he knew he was getting the raw end of this deal when he signed up.)

Here, in Korea, at a quarter past three in the morning at the end of the first week of May, 1952, BJ shows off that same responsiveness by tightening his grip on Hawkeye’s hips and sinking down to take him entirely in his mouth.

“ _God_ ,” Hawkeye groans loudly, not even caring a little who hears. That could be anything: frustration, anger, exhaustion. He lowers his voice to whisper what feels a little more unmistakeable: “You’re gonna make me come.”

“Mmm,” BJ affirms: best he can do with a mouth stuffed to gasping with cock. The sound echoes around the tent and the soft tissue of his throat vibrates around Hawkeye’s cock and Hawkeye fists his fingers into the sheets so hard that he briefly wonders whether it’s the surgically responsible thing to do. He takes a deep breath, convinced that he’s bought himself a few more minutes, before he looks down to stroke the hair out of BJ’s face and the man has the nerve to look up at him, through impossibly thick eyelashes, and look both wicked and doe-eyed as he raises his eyebrows.

“ _God, _ that’s it,” Hawkeye shouts - again, anything - and thrusts up once, twice, three times.

BJ takes everything, and Hawkeye sighs.

“Get up here, Romeo,” he whispers, pulling BJ up by the shoulders and throwing the blanket over both of them. He presses his lips to BJ’s mouth, still gasping from his own orgasm, and reaches down into BJ’s fatigues.

“Gonna give as good as I get,” he murmurs, though sloppy kisses, noting with delight the flush that’s swept over every inch of BJ’s skin and reduced his breathing to choppy gasps, and BJ responds with the kind of incoherent moan that means he’s worked himself into being too close to speak just by giving a blowjob. Hawkeye loves this man more than life itself.

“You like this?” he asks, giving BJ a squeeze and reveling in the sigh that earns him as he begins to stroke, and BJ begins to thrust into the loose lazy fist Hawkeye is forming. “Because I love it. BJ, I swear to God, there’s nothing in the world I love more than I love watching you fall apart.” He smiles. “Except maybe knowing that I’m the one taking you apart.”

“Hnngh,” BJ groans, letting out a tiny giggle in spite of himself. Hawkeye smiles wider and kisses him beside the back of his ear, near the hairline, where sweat is wicking across his neck.

“Oh, yeah, real coherent,” he teases, dragging his teeth from behind BJ’s ear across the column of his neck, pressing a kiss to his throat and giving him one last good jerk, which is apparently what it takes. Thirty-seven strokes, a scrape of teeth, and a touch of dirty talk, and BJ is falling apart. Hawkeye would tease him later if he hadn’t come from less than that in the showers last Wednesday thinking about the warmer weather on the way, and the way BJ’s fatigues sit low on his hips in the summertime.

They lie next to each other, catching their breath, until BJ rolls to look out the tiny trapezoid-shaped hole in the canvas, near the top of the tent, through the mosquito netting and into the sky.

“The stars are out,” he whispers, propping himself up on his elbows. He kisses Hawkeye’s hair as he crawls over his body to get a better look outside and something in Hawkeye flares up at how instinctive BJ’s affection is. He can’t ever remember a time where BJ didn’t touch him as if Hawkeye’s body was an extension of his own. “That’s the only thing I love about this place. The stars are never this clear in San Francisco.”

“The only thing, huh?” Hawkeye tugs on BJ’s t-shirt sleeve, pulling him away from the sky and back down to the ground, and BJ lets himself be baited, falling back down onto the cot and resting half of his weight onto the other man.

“Real answer, or bullshit?” he asks, in that honest, straightforward way that feels at once perfect and too much for Hawkeye.

“Real,” Hawkeye answers, swallowing.

“You are a thing I love, but you aren’t anything near ‘a thing about this place’.” BJ shakes his head. “If anything, you exist  _ in spite _ of this place.”

“That’s the best thing you’ve said the whole time we’ve been here,” Hawkeye replies, striving for lightness, but BJ barrels on.

“Yeah, well, you’re the best thing that’s happened the whole time I’ve been here.”

Hawkeye scoffs. “Give it time.”

“Hey, just let me, okay?” BJ rests his head back on the pillow and closes his eyes, stroking his fingertips down the sides of Hawkeye’s temples. There’s a deep tiredness to him that Hawkeye doesn’t recognize from the fleeting exhaustion that follows him in and out of the OR; after staring for a few moments, Hawkeye realizes that here, in the darkest part of the night, BJ has begun to look old. “Just let me say something kind to you, okay? Something loving, yeah? I don’t even need you to say it. I just need you to hear it.”

“Okay.” Something about the way that BJ, even around a yawn, can make his voice strong without being hard or stern takes all the fight out of Hawkeye. For the millionth time, it feels like Hawkeye is watching BJ and frantically taking notes:  _ Defend yourself without striking others.  _ “Yeah.”

“Well… hey.” BJ watches Hawkeye give up and softens all over, leaning over to kiss behind his ear. The gesture seems to take any energy he’d managed to keep, and when he falls back down to the pillow, Hawkeye knows he’s fighting sleep. “Hey. I know it’s hard. I don’t think I quite understand why, and I wish I did so I could help, but I do know that it’s hard for you. I’m sorry for pushing.”

“Don’t be sorry.”

“Okay. I won’t. You either,” BJ murmurs, kissing the side of Hawkeye’s head and drawing him near as his chest begins to rise and fall with the deep evenness of 3AM, and it strikes Hawkeye that for BJ, it really is this simple.

They lie together long enough that Hawkeye loses track of the number of chirps he hears from the cricket who’s lived outside the Swamp since the first day he got here: maybe the only resident of the 4077th who predates him and Margaret. He thinks about that first night and how much he hated that blessed cricket, and about how gladly he clings, now, to each thread he can find.

Summer is coming. The nights are getting warm. BJ began to steal kisses in autumn: a time of the year when a person takes stock of the things he holds precious and dear and he hides them, as a matter of course, because a MASH in the winter is no place for things loved and unprotected. But May and June bring screen doors, and tent flaps rolled up to keep out the heat, and Hawkeye has no idea how they will continue to keep a fire like this hidden. Something bright and beautiful blooms in his heart at the idea that they will be given the chance to try.

Hawkeye is thirty-four and he has gotten to thinking, as the day’s first bits of pink and coral streak into the Korean sky at the end of the first week in May, 1952, that he’s had enough practice with beginnings and with endings, and that perhaps it’s time to try his hand at  _ again_, at  _ still_, at  _ tomorrow_. He thinks of the apartment he continued to live in for three months after Carlye left, and how he could still today tell you how many tiles made up the ceiling over their bed. He thinks of all the goodbyes he practiced after Trapper went away, ultimately left unused and unheard at the bottom of a million unread letters. He thinks of BJ’s chest, rising and falling beneath him, breathing love like an instinct: on, and on, and on.

He practices, allowing himself to linger over the language he has carried so long -  _ I love you; I have loved you; I did love you; I loved you so much _ \- and as he recites, he finds that he remembers all of these familiar doorways and rounded corners, a house built over a lifetime without thinking and a map traveled absently, as a matter of course. He finds, too, that though he has told himself these stories hundreds of times, he also - somehow - knows the end, as if it has been there all along.

He practices:  _ I love you, still. _

He practices:  _ I love you, again. _

He practices:  _ I love you, tomorrow. _

+

It’s an absurd idea, after so long, but they go home. Korea ends, and they do not. BJ says G-O-O-D-B-Y-E, loving Hawkeye in the same earnest way that’s been shattering him to small pieces since the day they met, and then goes home to California, where he picks up the phone and says,  _ I miss you_, and then says,  _ Come out here_, and when Hawkeye demurs, says, a little more insistently:  _ No, really. You should_, and then, less insistently, more softly:  _ I want you to. Please._ And so Hawkeye buys a pink linen shirt (when in Rome) and he gets on a plane and he goes to goddamn California and when he gets off the plane three thousand miles away BJ wraps him up so tightly that no one can see him start to cry, which is just as well as far as he’s concerned, and BJ smells exactly like he always has, and when Peg hugs him she angles her body so that his tears come off on her shoulder, and she smells exactly like Hawkeye’s always thought she would. 

If he’d ever allowed himself to imagine anything remotely like this morning, he would have imagined it exactly like this. 

On the way home - to BJ’s home, to the grey bungalow Hawkeye’s been hearing about for years - Erin sits next to Hawkeye in the backseat and presents him with a lollipop larger than her head and tells him that she helped make up the guest bedroom this morning after buying new sheets with her Mom so that Hawkeye could have a set of his own. “So you feel happy,” Erin explains, popping her own lollipop into her mouth and unwrapping Hawkeye’s for him. BJ’s glassy eyes catch his in the rearview mirror:  _ this is what I’ve been trying to tell you_.

And this is how Hawkeye Pierce learns to keep writing the story, and what it looks like on the other side of a goodbye.

+

_ I’ve seen too much to ever be wide-eyed again_.

San Francisco doesn’t look much like Maine.

Oregon does.

There is a moment on the second full day of the vacation that BJ and Peg have invited Hawkeye along for -  _ no_, Hawkeye says, flatly, immediately, and Peg stares at him with her hands on her hips until he amends:  _ well, okay, maybe_, and three months later, here they all are - that manages to be at once a very small thing, and perhaps the most important thing that has ever happened to him.

“Wake up,” Peg’s soft, sweet voice says to Erin. From Hawkeye’s bedroom, adjacent to the vacation house’s main room, her voice is a murmur. The windows are open and Hawkeye smells pine and fresh air and salt, and the sun streams into the room and throws patterns all over his quilt. BJ is snoring quietly in the next bedroom, and Hawkeye thrills at the knowledge that all these small details are safe: that BJ is still the type who would sleep late into the morning, given the chance, and that, after Korea, his sleep is occasionally still marked by deep, even breaths.

“What do you want to read this morning, sweetheart?” Peg asks her daughter (BJ’s daughter, the same daughter that BJ greedily soaked in every single word about in Korea, over and over and over again, wearing the pages down until the paper was falling apart and Hawkeye and BJ, surgeons that they are, carefully taped them back together), and she sounds so much like Adelaide Pierce that Hawkeye lays in bed and stares at the ceiling, the weight of something like wonder pressing down onto his chest in a way that fills him up, rather than pinning him down.

“The Jungle Book,” Erin answers, and Hawkeye flashes back to that very first day in Korea:  _ when all around you are losing theirs_.

_ Kipling_, BJ had said, immediately, and how little of the mystery Hawkeye had known then. How little he’d known then to turn around and say,  _ yes, Kipling_. How little he’d realized that a year before, on the other side of the world, BJ and Peggy Hunnicutt had moved into a tiny home in California and each brought copies of the same gold-leafed book that someday they would read to their daughter, and that Peggy Hunnicutt had given up her husband, had read the book alone, so that on the other side of the world, BJ could read it to Hawk instead.

“Goodness, yes,” Peggy answers now, delight soaking into every corner of her voice. “ _Now Rann the Kite brings home the night that Mang the Bat sets free_ ,” she recites, and Hawkeye would be struck by what a beautiful life BJ and Peggy have created for Erin if he weren’t busy feeling a deep ache in his heart, in his bones, in his soul at comprehending what a beautiful life they’ve created for  _ him_.

“Could you read for two, Peg, you think?” Hawkeye asks, opening the door to his bedroom and crossing the main room to sit cross-legged next to the cast-iron stove, so similar to the one Daniel Pierce had stoked every single morning of Hawkeye’s entire life.

“I think I probably have been for ages now,” she tells him, and her smile reaches her eyes as she leans down to kiss the top of Erin’s head but continues to look at Hawkeye. “Now then.  _ It was seven o’clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills…_”


End file.
